Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62

Mao’s Great Famine is surely the best and most comprehensive general
history of the famine published to date. Dikötter is a reliable guide
to the utopian origins of the Great Leap, to the export of
agricultural commodities to pay for industrial investment at the
height of the famine, to the competitive frenzy among provincial
cadres to promise unattainable bumper harvests, to the mobilisation of
untold millions of people in ill-advised drainage, dam, irrigation and
iron foundry projects, to the agro-fantasy that close planting and
deep (one-metre) ploughing would raise yields astronomically, to the
evolving elite debates on the consequences for the rural population of
gigantic communes, collective dining and grain requisitions.